“Sorry, my fat American fingers accidentally entered the wrong code, you understand.”

Yet even this nearly pointless action is still infinitely more than you will ever accomplish for your civil rights.

Probably people who thought they could make an app with AI, realised it’s not possible to make good software without actually learning how software is made, and never opened Cursor or whatever again.

Technically valid but extremely rich coming from a US state of all places.

https://iowaspulse.com/iowa-flock-license-plate-cameras-privacy/

Safe to say they’re not against spying in general.

If you’re an average American, the spying Iowa allows and embraces put you in far graver danger than spying by China who doesn’t give a shit about you or what you have to say about them. America, as we’ve seen, cares slightly more about what Americans say than China does.

I’d stay clear of Temu mainly because it’s a shitty platform replete with blatant scams and you risk losing your money. Go to an actually reputable Chinese site if you want to buy from one, or don’t if you don’t.

Also don’t buy cloud/app enabled cameras if you give a shit about privacy. From anywhere, period, because doing so guarantees you’ll be spied on by someone, China or otherwise. Roll your own local network camera system with hardware and software you control or get ones that only record to local storage with no smart features.

Incidentally, I must also be paid to use Windows.

I’ll gladly wait for the Node.js start menu to render on company time 👍

Two layers of “based on” in your OS is indeed a bit much.

Commodore as a brand has ruined every company that’s ever bought it. Cursed brand some say.

All of the “delete my information from data brokers” services IMO, especially the ones that advertise on YouTube. Always smelled fishy to me.

Either that or they’re just more data brokers trying to get exclusivity.

Lemmy.world, which you log into and is the one that receives your VPN connection, uses Cloudflare in front of their server. So it’s actually Cloudflare that receives your VPN connection. It’s probably giving you that captcha screen which your app can’t display (or being denied entirely). I’m on VPN too and when a link makes me open a .world post it gives me the Cloudflare captcha every time.

Not guaranteed to be this reason but my money’s on it. Try logging into lemmy.world from your browser on the VPN, will help you troubleshoot if it gives nonstandard pages when trying to post or especially when logging in.

TL;DR:

Supported Environments for reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification:

• Android Devices:
  • Google Play Services version 25.41.30 or greater.
  • To verify Google Play Services version on an Android device, open Settings > Apps > All Apps > Google Play Services
• iOS/iPadOS devices for QR Code Scan:
  • Version 15.0 or greater.
• iOS/iPadOS devices for “Click to Verify” Button:
  • Version 16.4 or greater.
  • Version 15.0-16.4 with the reCAPTCHA app installed.

Fuck Google

Also, Chinese cities don’t give a shit if you decorate the outside of your unit. HOAs do.

Literally one of the first complaints libs have about Chinese cities is “copy paste skyscrapers everywhere.” They have some variety in parts of the city but most of the residential areas are still “boring” and “homogeneous” and “designed to kill individualism” according to Western internet geniuses.

Minimalism in GUIs, maybe (still, give me CLI any day). But minimalism in housing and infrastructure is absolutely critical and they are absolutely not equal to software. We need to be as efficient as we can because I don’t know if the author has noticed the state of housing in the world. How many more “boring, dull” buildings could be built for the same price? How many more if we copy pasted the same designs instead of demanding everything be unique? (But god forbid they be too different from the existing style or else the NIMBYs protesting minimalist buildings complain about that too.) The people who “prefer” the visually complex building have never been homeless in the back alley of that building before, nor have they ever been priced out of their neighbourhood by gentrification when their boring gray building gets torn down to build the pretty building.

This is where commit based version control can help mitigate the damage or detect it early. The golden rule in AI assistance in programming (if you’re going to use it) is to check the changes to make sure you understand everything before you commit it. If documents had a git-like version control system it would be easier to detect corruption early.

Or just use Markdown files in a git repo IDK

Not really. Proprietary software have just as many if not more vulnerabilities. Linux is just more honest and open about reporting them so it seems like they have more.

TL;DR: A lot of interesting history about Japanese game and console development, some good points about AI in software development, but I’m mainly disappointed in the title and it made me read the article with the wrong lens for way too long. I was eager to learn how specifically Miyamoto managed to jump to mastery in high level software architecture without personally writing code in a time long before generative AI, and it did not deliver on that.

never compiled a line of code

Like, taking high level code and writing out the corresponding executable binary? Unless he works with magnetic core memory, yeah I doubt he ever needs to do that.

I get what the article is saying but this is a weird way to word it.

Miyamoto sat next to programmers and iterated on numbers until the feel was right. The programmers typed. Miyamoto decided what they were typing toward.

[…]

He made them by understanding the machine, the medium, and the human at a level most of his programmers could not reach.

OK but I doubt he has never programmed himself. To be good at doing that probably means he did his fair share of stumbling through mistakes in his own software.

output of a design process that operated above the opcodes and above the data structures, at the level where the whole system coheres or doesn’t.

With the age of the games referenced and the mention of opcodes I assume the “actual” programmers were writing assembly? In that case it does make more sense. He’s probably manually doing a lot of the high level features modern developers now expect to be built into the language. Mad respect.

The industry calls that “design,” and files it in a separate drawer from engineering/coding.

Is that true? That definitely sounds like engineering to me. When I hear “design” I tend to associate it with things like UI mockups in a program like Figma or something. Or in game development, defining the worlds/levels/progression tree.

Level 1: syntax. Loops, types, recursion, the standard stuff. How you write a correct sentence in the language. […]

Level 2: flow. What you do with Level 1. Formally correct and good versus formally correct and terrible. […]

Level 3: architecture. Macro decisions. Full awareness of all the consequences of each call before you make it. Why your node system is trigger-pull-based and not event-pushed. Why your data layer returns synchronously even though everyone expects async. Why you chose a flat table over a pretty schema because the retrieval pattern matters more than the shape. Level 3 is where systems either cohere or silently fall apart two years later, and you usually can’t tell which it is until it’s too late.

[…]

And Level 3 judgment usually grows out of Level 1 time: the architects whose decisions hold up ten years later are, overwhelmingly, people who spent a decade at the keyboard before they stopped needing to. Miyamoto is a genuine exception, not a template.

[…]

Miyamoto operates almost entirely at Level 3. He doesn’t operate at Level 1, he delegates it, and has for nearly fifty years.

Again, the article vaguely implies that he has only ever done level 3 but doesn’t explain further. Nothing so far has explicitly stated he’s never personally written a program other than the title.

The industry lets Miyamoto be a genius. It does not let him be a coder. Those are different containers, and the border between them is patrolled harder than almost any other line in this profession. Designer is allowed to mean taste, vision, intuition, feel. Coder is reserved for the people who type. A definition as narrow as narrow can be. Not architect, not systems thinker, not person-who-decides-what-the-machine-should-do, no. It is: “Person who types”. The entire conceptual territory beyond the keyboard has been recast as “design” and quietly removed from the coding conversation, because coding as a word has been collapsed to its most accidental layer. Philosophically speaking.

Maybe this is different for the game industry but I don’t really hear the term “coder” used that much, as in someone who only writes code with no input on higher level designs. Usually it’s called developer which implies all three levels the article mentions.

The work Miyamoto actually does - the architectural decisions that determine whether the system coheres - has no home inside that definition. So it gets filed under “design,” which is the industry’s word for “important but not coding.”

Again, maybe game development is different, but usually those decisions are lumped in with writing code. The project manager or client don’t really care what the internal architecture is, just that it does the thing it needs to. Design to me is even higher level than that, going into what the application should do, who will use it, and what problems it’s supposed to solve for them.

The article then goes into how the game boy came to be, and for the most part I agree here. Gunpei Yokoi focused on the experience instead of technical specs, which is what consumers actually care about especially for a game console. This is definitely something more people in software development should learn from, because in the end no one cares what kind of technology is behind some application, as long as it does the thing. This is even more true for hardware design which has orders of magnitude longer life cycles for a particular technology, also cost for hardware is directly proportional to how “advanced” the tech is.

The industry’s blindness to Yokoi isn’t an accident. It’s structural. The industry only measures Level 1 reliably and Level 2 occasionally, and has no vocabulary for Level 3 that isn’t vibes. The Yokois and the Miyamotos get classified as “designers” or “visionaries”: nice words, soft words, words that imply they don’t really belong in the engineering conversation… while the Level 1 people who implemented their ideas get the engineer title.

Again, from what I’ve seen they’re definitely seen as part of the engineering conversation.

People thought AI would make Level 1 coders ten times more productive and leave the architects behind. It’s closer to the opposite. AI does a growing slice of the Level 1 work now, and that slice is growing faster than the industry’s ability to readjust to that change. Level 1 coders worry for a reason, and their anger is rational.

I mean, I’ve definitely seen that conversation about development going from writing code to higher level design pretty much as soon as AI coding tools came out. You could even say that’s an embodiment of all programming higher level than assembly, a way to offload low level implementation in favour of higher level “design.” There’s a whole other conversation to be had about whether current AI is “good enough” to actually trust to replace manual writing of code, but I think most people in software development could see from very early on that it won’t be long until AI can code as well as humans.

If you’re a coder reading this and you’re angry, I understand. But the worst thing you can do right now is double down on Level 1 signaling. The LeetCode grinding, the “real engineers do it by hand” posture, the insistence that craft means typing is the direction that gets you nothing, because the machines do that pretty well by now and are going to keep getting better. Sorry.

Probably good advice for most people but just because AI can do it now doesn’t mean we will no longer have any need for level 1 people. I mean, you still have to maintain the programming languages AI uses, sure you can use AI for that too but at some point you still need humans involved for troubleshooting. It will just become a niche and not the default. Take assembly as a parallel. Most people don’t need to write assembly anymore, but every once in a while you still have to go through the assembly the compiler generates and check for things like whether it’s correctly optimizing stuff, using certain hardware acceleration features, etc. Or how processor design is mostly done in HDL nowadays but you still need people to know the actual physics governing the circuits themselves.

IMO, if you find that your calling TRULY IS the manual implementation of algorithms by writing code, I say still pursue that passion. You’ll still be needed and that passion will make you extremely valuable. I think AI can eventually free people from being forced to do that when what they really want to do is higher level design, which I suspect is a good majority of developers. But that only means the people who want to do that can focus more on their specific niche.

Not sure why you brought the nationality of the devs into this, but I don’t trust games in general, at least without some kind of containerisation or sandboxing. If I wanted tons of people to run my data mining trojan and not pay attention to things like processor load or network traffic, I’d probably make it a game.

Honestly if you’re at the point of suspecting that your Linux system is infected, just back everything up, wipe, and reinstall. Make sure to use a known good computer to make the install disk, and completely wipe the drive before install and not use existing partitions.

People have mentioned Wireshark which you can use to monitor for suspicious network activity, but IMO for most people this isn’t super helpful because it’s hard to tell what’s suspicious and what’s normal from Wireshark alone without quite a bit of networking/software knowledge. Maybe there’s more user friendly packet capture software though, something that can string the packets together into their respective connections and summarise key information like the protocol and domain involved.

QDirStat can visualize the contents of your drive as an interactive map. Might be helpful for finding files that aren’t supposed to be there.

ClamAV is an open source antivirus available for Linux but I don’t know how well it does at actually detecting Linux malware. Seems to be more for people running file/email servers to scan incoming file uploads.

Including .world lol